Irrevocable GPL

Irrevocable GPL

Look at it from the commercial point of view. Suppose you are IBM and you pay someone (say, The SCO Group) for the right to redistribute their code at any point in the future. (What IBM might call a "perpetual, irrevocable license".) Then at some later point TSG tells you that you cannot redistribute that code anymore to your customers because they are having second thoughts: the license was not, after all, perpetual nor irrevocable. Never mind that TSG didn't have the copyrights after all, and that their case was feeble to say the least; do you think they would have stood a chance in court, just on this point alone?

Now tell us: does the exchange of money change anything? The GPL is actually a "perpetual, irrevocable license"; another line of defense for IBM was that TSG had actually distributed that same code they were suing about under the GPL. Note that they did not argue that they were taking the GPL back; in this instance they chose to say that they only distributed the code under the GPL unknowingly.

This is all a glob of speculation, of course, with just a thin factual wrapper. But it would seem to me that in order for someone to revoke the license, they would have to convince the court that they didn't want to distribute under such a "perpetual, irrevocable" license. This would make them look like a bunch of fools, be difficult to prove, and take back all pretense of good will. And this is under US law; in other countries ignorance of the law is not such a good defense in court. In any case it doesn't look like a good strategy to this non-lawyer, except to make a lot of noise with little to gain.